I'm Feeling Lucky (53 page)

Ouch. When you start getting marketing advice from journalists, something is seriously out of whack. Cindy agreed and even admitted regret for not having supported my recommendation more forcefully. The executive staff conceded that "All the world's products" might have overreached. Pearl asked me to prepare another slide explaining why it was a bad tagline. To all the reasons I had listed previously, I added, "It's blatantly and provably untrue." At the January 2003 GPS meeting, the executive staff agreed to switch to the line I had recommended. Eric even raised the possibility of killing the Froogle name and integrating the service directly into
Google.com
results.
^*

These developments left me with an unaccustomed feeling. I had been right in an argument with Larry and Sergey and Eric. Sometimes you just get lucky. It did embolden me, though. My instincts for our brand had been correct. Perhaps this would open a door and give marketing more credibility and access to the product-development process earlier in the pipeline. That way we could avoid last-minute scrambles and apply the same intelligence to branding as we did to the product's features. Perhaps the tension between product management and my consumer-marketing group would diminish.

I looked forward to exploring areas of interdepartmental cooperation in 2003, but I wouldn't get the chance for a while. Cindy had asked me to go to Tokyo. We had won Yahoo Japan's search business in November, and we needed to understand more about promoting our product in that market. I'd be operating out of our new office in the Shibuya neighborhood and would interview some job candidates, consult with ad agency Dentsu, and meet with a marketing group that had done some work for us. All very straightforward.

I let Cindy know I could probably squeeze the trip in, though it would be a hardship for Kristen, home with our three kids before the holidays. Japan was familiar turf for me: I'd been a Rotary scholar in Nagoya for a year after college. But the idea of taking my first international business trip secretly thrilled me. At forty-four, I was experiencing the same excitement I had felt the first day of high school. I had graduated to a new status because my company valued me enough to send me five thousand miles away.

Imagine, then, my elation when a couple weeks after my return from Japan, Cindy asked me to leave again. This time it was to help Sergey and our international PR team open a new office in Milan. We hosted a press conference and party at a trendy nightclub. I ate a dozen different cheeses at a single meal and discovered that wearing a nice suit from Macy's put me three fashion steps behind the barista serving me cappuccino. And cappuccino didn't look at all like what I got at Starbucks, but tasted like foamy caffeinated ambrosia. I cut the epaulets off my London Fog overcoat with a razor because no one in Italy wore epaulets, and I cursed my slick-soled loafers because they gave me no purchase on the rain-soaked marble streets. I carried deflated exercise balls around half the city looking for a place with an air pump to fill them for our coming-out party. It was all fantastic. By the time I got home I had convinced myself I should focus all my attention on building our international brand and keep a packed suitcase under my desk for quick getaways.

"Maybe you could take me next time," Kristen suggested, ironing my shirts as I regaled her with tales of couture and cannoli.

"Oh," I said unthinkingly as she maneuvered the heavy hot iron around a collar, "I was in meetings all day. What would you do on your own in Milan? You'd just be bored."

It's a testament to my wife's generous character that I'm still alive to tell that tale.

I would go to Japan again for Google, and to China, but there was too much going on in Mountain View to make constant globe-hopping feasible. I had branding guidelines to work out for new partners and language to draft for new products and site tours and newsletters. And I wanted to spend the credibility capital I had earned from Froogle. I decided to invest some of it to promote my ideas about the consumer brand we were building and how it should evolve.

N
O, DAD," I
told my father as I watched pop-up ads spread across his screen, obscuring Google's homepage. "Google's not doing that. You've downloaded something you shouldn't have." I spent the next two hours of my vacation cleaning parasite programs off his computer.

Scumware was back. The malicious software that launched a thousand pop-up ads had never really gone away, but as 2003 began Googlers became increasingly alarmed by the proliferation of new mutant forms across the Internet. Matt Cutts, who dealt with the dark arts of the web every day in his battles against porn and spam, had reached a boiling point. On a visit to Omaha, Matt had spent an entire day cleaning scumware off his mother-in-law's PC. When he got back, his own computer had been infected. Worst of all, the company distributing the scumware afflicting him turned out to be a partner in Google's new syndicated-ads network. We were sending them ads to show on their website and then paying them every time someone clicked on one. We were bankrolling their scummy behavior. Matt and I were not the only ones enraged.

"I'd love to file a lawsuit and have a head on a pike," Matt recalls Larry saying about scumware creators and distributors. Matt's proposed solution was to post a screed on
Google.com
like the one we had launched previously about pop-up ads, but with a specific focus on identifying and removing scumware programs. I was a hundred percent for it, but this time, others had concerns. First, it would be hard to be righteous when we were doing business with a scumware site. We'd have to terminate that relationship before going any further. Second, several engineers were reluctant to launch an arms race against an invisible enemy while we were a sitting target.

Marissa proposed a compromise. We would be launching a pop-up blocker for the Google toolbar in a month or two. It would stop pop-ups from appearing, but not remove the programs that launched them. Could we fold Matt's language about scumware into the page talking about that new feature? She argued that simply taking a stand against scumware without context might seem self-serving, that people would think we just didn't want to lose revenue from users the programs hijacked to other sites.

I didn't want to compromise. Scumware was not a revenue issue, it was a privacy issue. I had personally experienced the invasive nature of a parasite program, and seen my dad's frustration as it crippled his computer. That infuriated me and perhaps clouded my judgment. I assured Matt I was prepared to wield a flaming sword and pursue those responsible to the ends of the earth. Or at the least, to make a positive assertion that Google was not behind the nasty behavior that irritated affected users. Google was righteous. "Google," I wanted the world to know, "would never screw its users."

Matt said he liked the idea of Google as a consumer advocate, fighting on behalf of users even on issues not directly affecting us. That encouraged me. The more I thought about it, the more I convinced myself that "consumer advocate" should be the next phase of Google's brand evolution. We would leave the sea of search and step onto the dry land of a new, more wondrous world in which we would become not just the source of information but the ally and protector of users who were searching for answers. In addition to being "fast, accurate, and easy to use," we would be a trusted friend.

So when a parallel discussion started in January 2003 about Google's own privacy policy and what we revealed to users about the data we collected from their searches, something clicked in my head. "We need to cross the streams," I thought. It was all related. Scumware. Privacy. The Google toolbar. "Yada," I realized in a moment of transcendental clarity, "yada."

Our "Not the usual yada yada" message had forestalled an uproar over our toolbar tracking users as they moved across the web. Now we could shelter ourselves from a PR cataclysm over privacy and fight scumware at the same time by employing a similar tactic. I knew a firestorm was coming. We were not immune to criticism about our privacy policy—from mild concerns to wild conspiracy theories. We had people's most intimate thoughts in our log files and, soon enough, people would realize it. We didn't know who searched for what, but, as I had seen after 9/11, there were ways to extract that information if someone was motivated to do so.

Chances are you've Googled yourself. Almost all of us have searched for our own names. When you do that, Google sees your IP address, the number corresponding to your computer's connection point on the Internet. If you connect to the Internet via a large commercial Internet service provider (ISP), a new IP address is theoretically assigned each time you log on
^*
and then reissued to others when you turn off your computer. In practice, however, your IP address may not change for days or even months.

If you've used Google before, most likely you also have a Google cookie on your computer—a unique string of digits Google placed there so it can remember your preferences each time you come back (preferences like "apply SafeSearch filtering" or "show results in Chinese"). Google doesn't know your name or your real-world location, though your IP address may reveal your city if your ISP assigns blocks of numbers to specific geographic regions.

Looking at all the searches conducted from one IP address by a computer with a cookie assigned to it over a period of time could give a search engine data about individual user behavior. That information would be invaluable in improving both the relevance of search results and the targeting of advertising.

Why is the information helpful? Say that for a single twenty-four- hour period you threw all the search terms entered by one cookie/IP address combo into a bucket and analyzed them to establish correlations. Then say you compared those correlations with those found in other buckets: other searches conducted by other cookied computers. Patterns would emerge. So if you found that a search for "best sushi in Mountain View" was often followed by a search for "Sushi Tomi restaurant," you might associate Sushi Tomi with the best sushi in Mountain View. A large search engine could compare tens of millions of buckets to determine how terms were related to one another. With that much data, you could derive some fairly definitive answers.

Using searchers' data, though, creates a fundamental dilemma. How do you protect user privacy while retaining the maximum value of the data for improving the search engine that collected it? Part of Google's answer was to anoint Nikhil Bhatla our "privacy czar." One of the first questions Nikhil raised was about identifying a user strictly from the stream of queries tied to one cookie over time. He shared an anecdote about engineer Jeff Dean, who had been working in the logs system where user search data was recorded. Jeff noticed that one cookie had been conducting a very interesting series of queries on technical topics, using highly sophisticated search techniques. He was impressed by the searcher's acumen. Only after studying the data further did he realize that the query stream he was looking at came from his own computer.

Nikhil's question kicked off a privacy debate among Googlers that dragged on for weeks. No one wanted to identify users or misuse the information we collected. But we also knew we weren't the only ones who might see the data in our logs. It was 2003. The Patriot Act had been the law of the land for a little more than a year, loosening restrictions on the government's ability to access email and other electronic communication records. The Justice Department could request data from Google, and we would be legally bound not to tell users that their information had been passed to law enforcement officials. Attorney General John Ashcroft might soon be knocking on our door.

The arguments raised were so complex and technical that it would be impossible to detail them all here.
^*
The main issues, though, had to do with controlling access to logs data by Google staff, the length of time Google retained user data files, notifying users that we were storing their search information, and giving users the option to delete data we had collected. The tradeoff with each of these would be a reduction in Google's ability to mine logs data to make better products for all its users.

I trusted that my colleagues would make intelligent, ethical decisions on data access and retention. The point I cared most about was notification. I drafted a proposal outlining all the things we could do,
should
do to lead the discussion on privacy and to set an industry standard. Instead of avoiding the issues raised by the collection of user data, I advocated we embrace them. We had nothing to hide. We could establish an advisory committee of outside privacy advocates, set up a public forum in Google groups, post tutorials about data gathering on our site, and give instructions on how to delete cookies to avoid being tracked.

Matt Cutts and Wayne Rosing, our VP of engineering, loudly and publicly supported the plan. I started thinking about ways we could build an area on our site for consumer advocacy. Then Cindy let me know privately that one Googler was not pleased with my proposal. Marissa, Cindy said, claimed that the idea of an advisory panel was hers and that I had neglected to give her credit. I rolled my eyes. I had suggested an advisory panel because we had had one at the
Merc.
I had not been in any meeting at which Marissa brought up the topic and so had no idea that she had suggested something similar.

I was tempted to fire off a note to that effect, but at my performance review a couple of weeks earlier Cindy had instructed me to stop waging email wars that went on forever. So instead of refuting Marissa over the ether, I set up a face-to-face meeting. It took me a week to get on her calendar, and even then her only available time was after dinner. As dusk fell, we went for a walk around the vacant lot next door to try and clear the air.